The Earthquake Engineering Online Archive

A mathematical model for the response of masonry walls to dynamic excitations

Sucuoglu, Haluk; Mengi, Yalçin; McNiven, Hugh D.

UCB/EERC-82/24, Earthquake Engineering Research Center, University of California, Berkeley, 1982-11, 133 pages (515/S92/1982)

The study involves three stages: experimental observations, choice of the form for a mathematical model, and optimization analysis. The masonry wall specimens were subjected to simulated earthquake ground motions and horizontal and vertical periodic excitations. Evaluation of the experimental data indicates that the first two modal frequencies are close to each other. This is attributed, on physical grounds, to strong interaction between the brick and mortar phases of the wall. Hence, a two-phase mathematical model (mixture model) is chosen to describe the wall behavior because of its capability of differentiating between the two phases of the wall and of taking into account the interaction between them. The equations of the mixture model are put into a discrete form to simplify the analysis. The parameters appearing in the model are determined, through optimization, by matching theoretical and experimental responses in frequency space.

Available online: http://nisee.berkeley.edu/documents/EERC/EERC-82-24.pdf (4 MB)